Off Alaska: A Race Through the Arctic Ice

Even at night the aluminum sky gleams to every corner. To the south, a light swivels its beam around lonely Alaska, 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle and barely 1,400 miles from the North Pole. Five hundred yards to the north, an iceberg, bleached turquoise by the cold and shaped like a baby's cradle, rocks along. There is no driftwood or trash in the freezing Beaufort Sea. Nature all but forbade man to sail in this place, and Captain Walt Kardonsky knows it.

The skipper of the 9,000-hp. oceangoing tug Cavalier and his crew...

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